On October 22, 2011, Henry Hitchings, author of the upcoming book, The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, wrote a column in The Wall Street Journal titled “Is This the Future of Punctuation?”. In it, he proposes that English is rapidly becoming more oriented toward the spoken language than toward the conventions of written […]
Henry Hitchings on Punctuation Read More »
The December 2011 issue of National Geographic contains a fascinating article by Adam Nicolson about the genesis of the King James Bible. (A link to the article appears at the end of this post.) While the history surrounding the document is intriguing, I want to focus on the fluidity of the language. In choosing the
Using Simple Language in Business Writing Read More »
I received an email recently that contained the signature line: “Expect typos.” Why should I expect typos? I expect people to avoid them, especially in business correspondence. Cell phones breed typos. Granted, when one is typing with thumbs on a tiny screen, errors are more likely to creep in. But this does not mean that
Perils of Tiny Typing: Typos Read More »
Grammar! The word itself makes some people’s eyes glaze over. Shades of elementary school make eyelids droop. But think about it: When you receive an email or document that contains grammar and punctuation errors, how does it affect your opinion of the sender? When I ask this question in the Worktalk writing trainings, people use
A Common Grammar Gaffe: Don’t Let This Undermine You Read More »
During a recent road trip across southern Utah, I passed a store with the name Rumma’ge. I assume that the owner wanted to stand out from the crowd (which was pretty small to begin with) and dress up her store name to “Rumma’ge” instead of the dowdy “rummage.” Unfortunately, her use of the apostrophe was
Rumma’ging through Apostrophes Read More »
